D reaches 1000 questions on stackoverflow

[Atash]

On Thursday, 15 August 2013 at 05:06:48 UTC, Nick Sabalausky 
wrote:
> On Wed, 14 Aug 2013 22:56:30 +0200
> "Andre Artus" <andre.artus at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> A relatively small number of people are attracted to tools and 
>> languages that don't have broad exposure. These people are 
>> marked by dogged determinism and a high tolerance for [mental] 
>> pain. Your average Joe or Jane is not like that, they have 
>> something they want to achieve and if they perceive the 
>> language/tools are working against them they will try 
>> something else.
>> 
>
> FWIW, I'm sold on D specifically *because* I have very little 
> patience
> for tools that feel like they're working against me.

Totally with Nick on this one. I liked C/C++ specifically because 
of the generic programming aspect + static typing. Then I learned 
that D did it better. Then I switched for my personal projects 
(all recently).

== A self-case-study regarding SO

The conversion started after I read this post on SO:

http://stackoverflow.com/a/3560395/1467466

That... was shocking in simplicity. Shocking enough for me to 
play the what if game for a few minutes. It meant that someone 
could move a lot of functionality and hackery that build tools 
perform into the language and make it 'purdy. I *like* my code, 
including build tool, looking 'purdy. Or even 'purrrrrdy.

Looking at it now, that demo is a code snippet. It demos *the 
code* and the constructs and how pretty it looks. The bullet 
point answer above it, the accepted one, didn't catch my eyes. It 
was just a list of features. I mean, yeah, CTFE was exciting, but 
the code snippet demonstrating how succinct it all was... THAT 
WAS EYE CATCHING.

IT. WAS. 'PURDY.

D's flippin' awesome, I can implement functionality like C++'s 
'bind' function in 40 lines while the Boost library has to do in 
hundreds of lines (for compatibility, BUT STILL), I can deal with 
arbitrary tuples in a sane way, mixin arbitrary strings, I'm not 
constantly reaching down with my pointer finger to the less-than 
sign while my left hand is occupied with shift or scrunching my 
right pinky against the shift while my right middle is trying to 
hit the greater-than sign... D is just -pleasant-.

I'm enjoying all of this now *because* I was tipped off on D's 
awesomeness... by StackOverflow.

On the flip-side, here's 'nother tidbit (I saw this crazy thing 
before the post above):

http://stackoverflow.com/a/7303196/1467466

Yeah, sure, it's impressive, but there's no code snippet. There's 
no demo of how the code was *written*. C++ also has 
Turing-complete metaprogramming, whoopdeedoo. My only experience 
at that point with metaprogramming had been torturous for 
anything more than a little complicated; what else could I have 
expected of this clearly masochistic individual's code? "Nothing 
new here, moving along..." was my thinking there. The post above 
it had snippets, but was kind of long and I didn't feel like 
diving too deep when I didn't yet care much for the language.

== The long and short of it:

I'm only one data point, but I'm still a data point. :-P

I understand that, really, er'rything should be for knowledge's 
sake, but, if it isn't too much effort, please answer Qs while 
strutting D's prettiness on SO.

Massive, massive kudos to whoever's had the patience to answer 
newbie questions, as unclear as they may have been sometimes 
(such as my own).

== And the obligatory...

HI FIRST TIME POSTING. Just yell at me if I get too obnoxious and 
whatnot.